After my ranting about QA – which brought back our lead from hiding, at least for a while, let’s see how he fares this time – a number of people asked me what they could do to help QA improve. Given that we want both to test and prevent, here comes a list of desirable features and requests that could obviously be helpful:

I dunno, the vibe I get from those posts isn't that Gentoo needs more people, it's that some other devs screw up over and over and nobody puts them in their place. I'd say it needs LESS people._________________runit-init howto | Overlay - gtk2 stuff

Perhaps "developer hierarchy levels" should be introduced. We already have a council anyways.
What I'm getting at is that some devs concentrate more on portage, some more on ebuilds, etc.
Not everyone has the necessary skills/experience to do certain things, so I believe devs should be more restricted to certain types of task that they are best at. Also, based on their experience (which could be quantified by the number/size of their commits, elapsed time of being a dev, how often they commit, etc.) they could be granted different permissions (commit access) and privileges.

Benefits:

unprivileged devs lacking skills couldn't screw up things they should't be playing with anyways

for low-level dev positions the entry effort could be a bit lower which could lure in more people

devs would have a better understanding of who's working on what and therefore they could concentrate on their own tasks without being interrupted by other people asking them to do something beyond their expertise

this system would make sure that somebody isn't assigned too many tasks which he wouldn't have time to work on and these tasks that would otherwise just collect dust could be assigned to someone else

There already projects resembling this, like the sunrise overlay, proxy-maintaner project, maintainer assignments, liveDVD "one-man-teams", gentoo council, herds, etc.
However, these efforts aren't fully integrated, do not constitute a clear hierarchy and don't always cooperate or even work on similar stuff, duplicating functionality. This is what I'm getting at.
I believe making clearer who's responsible for what and what are his privileges would be beneficial both for devs as well as for users.

P.S.: I'm not a dev (yet, would like to become one in the next few moths) and therefore my suggestions have no real significance, however, I have a lot of experience with working in teams and I believe these principles are essential.